It was put there by the Committee for Small Government, headed by someone named Carla Howell. Her aim is to abolish the state income tax, her justification is her claim that 41% of government spending is waste.

She even backs her claim up with rock solid proof. Yup, she does. A Republican pollster asked 500 voters to speculate on ‘the share of every tax dollar that state government wastes’.

Yup, that’s pretty rock solid evidence. And there’s this reading:

But supporters of repealing the income tax say the figure is meaningful whether or not voters know its origins – and whether or not it’s precise.

And this:

Howell, a former Libertarian gubernatorial candidate, said she found it useful to be able to cite a number; the survey of 500 likely Massachusetts voters – conducted by the Republican pollster Fabrizio, McLaughlin & Associates – provided her with a tangible figure. But the actual percentage, 41, is not essential, she said.

Howell also claims that she puts the number in quotes on signs and documents supporting her quest to cut the legs out from under government in Massachusetts.

Yeah, quotes, yeah that makes it okay to use the uninformed opinion of citizens who haven’t a clue what they’re talking about and to pass it off as a fact. Or to put it in politer terms:

“It’s an absurd number,” said Michael Widmer, president of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, a business-backed budget research group. “That’s pulled out of the air. The public may think there’s 41 percent waste, but that has nothing to do with the facts.”

Once again the right, and it is the right wing at work here – Carla Howell ran on the Libertarian ticket for governor – unable to muster any evidence, any facts, any semblance of reality to support their bogus arguments, turn to make-believe and fantasy to push their nonsense on the rest of us.

Perhaps Ms. Howell would like to invest in some Easter eggs, laid by real bunnies and thus quite valuable. Give The Lion a call, lady, and we’ll cut a deal. But be forewarned that it will cost you – you don’t get something for nothing from The Lion the way you want to get something for nothing from government.

Johnny ‘I Haven’t Got A Clue’ McCain is pushing his latest slanders of Senator Obama by slathering on the word ‘liberal’ every time he mentions Obama. And of course he includes the Republican obligatory phrase ‘tax and spend’ in every other breath.

He conveniently fails to mention that the Republican philosophy, as practiced in the real world (something McCain is not at all familiar with), is to slash taxes, borrow to the hilt, and spend, spend, spend on useless things like moronic wars against techniques like terrorism, on bridges to nowhere, on turning loose the amoral pirates of capitalism who provide the Republican party with the bulk of their money. The result is an economy rapidly swirling the drain and a people living in fear that their home will be taken, a people knowing that their lives are one medical emergency away from living on the street, while the fat cat friends of McCain and Bush live high on the disaster they’ve created.

And Clueless John stands up there and says Obama is going to raise your taxes. He knows that’s a lie, but he keeps saying it anyway, proving he and his campaign are just another thing that’s bankrupt in this country. He’s just pissed off because Obama is going to raise taxes only on Johnny’s wealthy friends, who have been getting a free ride on the backs of the working people and the middle class ever since the Republicans took over Congress in 1995.

At least the ‘liberals’ try to use American money for American programs that seek to lift the country and the people up, instead of using money borrowed from China to grind the people down.

The Lion doesn’t want to dirty up your monitors with the pitiful contents of the letter, but will just note that it predicts Obama will be the most hated president in history, suggests that Newt Gingrich and his Contract on America were apparently some sort of revelation from the heavens, and adds this:

Just because the Republicans foul things up does not mean we will be any better off with Democrats. I would rather have a war in Iraq than a low standard of living in America.

Yessir, let’s have thousands more dead Iraqi women and children so this boffo idiot can buy another iPod. Or maybe if we kill enough Afghanis he can buy a new plasma television. How many Syrians should we kill so he can get new tires for his car? Maybe if he goes over there and kills a few Pakistani women and children he can build up enough credits for a new car.

Let’s see now, why is it that this Republican administration is almost universally despised around the world, and at home?

The banks to whom Paulson and friends gave all your future earnings aren’t using the money to restore the flow of credit.

They’re using it to buy banks. They don’t give a damn about the damage to the economy, to Main Street, to you, to your children. Why should they? Their friends in the Republican Party and the Republican Administration just handed them a blank check to do whatever they want.

It’s Christmas on Wall Street and the bankers have decided to live high on your dime and on your children’s dime.

The Lion’s stats spiked yesterday and today due to WordPress’s automatically generated ‘Possibly related posts’ feature over at the Fox News blog.

For some amazingly shallow neoconnity go there and then come back to The Lion’s earlier comment on Joe Biden and browse the latest comments.

The Lion supposes it’s nice to garner the numbers of hits, but really, some intelligence would have been better. The Lion has to wonder if any of the clones actually read the Fox article, or if they did, how they missed what it actually said. They appear to think that somehow the world is going to give Johnny Bomb Bomb McCain a pass and not test him with some crisis. In fact, The Lion feels pretty certain Bin Laden and his ilk would be very happy to have little Johnny ‘The Bomber’ McCain in the Oval Office. He’ll carry their water, just like George Bush and the neocons have done ever since September 11, 2001.

And if McBush wins the election and some regime or organization creates a crisis to test him, it’s practically guaranteed that he’ll pass it just like any other military dud who barely graduated at the bottom of his academy class and has a tenuous understanding of the world’s political, diplomatic, and military realities, and operates with gutter ethics and from an irrational, shoot-from-the-hip thoughtless paranoia.

China’s growth decelerated sharply and unexpectedly in the third quarter of this year to 9 percent, raising fears that the global financial crisis could pull one of the world’s fastest-growing economies into a recession.

The extent of the fall surprised economists, and several revised their economic forecasts for China downward to what the story terms ‘a dangerously low level for China’.

Tens of thousands of Chinese factories have closed. The stock market has lost billions of dollars.

The failing economy is being attributed to the global financial woes of late.

Some 1,500 dogs bred for their raccoon-like fur have died after eating feed tainted with melamine, a veterinarian said yesterday, raising questions about how widespread the industrial chemical is in China’s food chain.

And that’s on top of the recent dairy industry poisoning that killed several babies and sickened over 50,000 others, and found its way outside of China too.

Since the government of China and the industries of China are intent on profits to the point that they accept the killing of dogs, cats, babies, and apparently anything else from which they can profit, it seems only right to reject all goods from China.

It’s not just food. They even sold poisoned chairs. They sold chairs in Europe that had been coated with a substance that caused violent allergic reactions in people.

The Lion is doing his part to destroy the economy of China by refusing to buy anything made in China or containing any parts or ingredients from China. Of course that can’t always be determined, since the origin of ingredients is seldom listed and since American companies refuse to list them or notify consumers until compelled by law, regulation, or dying customers. But if something says ‘Made in China’ or ‘Made Anywhere Near China’ The Lion’s not buying it.

Buying dog food or a chair should not be a life or death decision.

But apparently that’s the Chinese way. So to hell with them. Let them rot in their own greed and callousness.

Not from apathy. Not from disinterest. Not because he had a hot date (he can’t remember what a hot date is like anyway).

It’s because the debates are wasted on The Lion.

Had he watched the last debate, The Lion would simply have yelled at the television (or radio – you do remember radio, right?) every time the Republican opened his mouth. Thus The Lion would have missed half the show, doing nothing but raising his blood pressure to unimaginable heights.

The Lion knows better than to let the Rethuglican candidate mess with The Lion’s mind like that.

The day after the debate The Lion spent watching snippets and bits on the various news and commentary programs, delighted to see that it went pretty much as expected and that The Lion was wise not to watch the whole thing at once.

Ninety minutes of watching John McHate smirk, grimace, and roll his eyes would tell any intelligent being all he needed to know about the Republican and his campaign, even if nothing else was known about them.

But when you put all the parts of the McCain campaign together, over the last several months, it becomes glaringly obvious that McCain has no interest in actually doing anything to improve the country on any level. McCain has one interest – getting his ugly ass into the White House, into the Oval Office, so he can play war with the lives of American soldiers and Muslim civilians, and thus confirm his ignorant arrogance about the Vietnam War.

He is all tactics and no strategy in pursuit of his goal. Ethical concerns, moral concerns, none of those matter. He continues to paint Senator Obama as a terrorist, despite the facts and despite McCain’s ties to a terrorist organization. He continues to paint Obama as inexperienced and not ready to lead, despite the fact that Obama has organized and run a hugely successful national presidential campaign to top off his twenty years experience in public and private accomplishments in the political arena. McCain’s campaign has been an exercise in incompetence and deceit and is failing badly, providing a convincing demonstration that the Senator from Arizona isn’t fit to lead so much as a bingo match. And McCain continues to lie when he says that his campaign isn’t fomenting hatred and racism against Obama. Yeah, you betcha, Johnny boy. Wink wink…

As for all those people who haven’t made up their minds yet, The Lion can only conclude that they lack courage, conviction, and intelligence, and are merely waiting for some huckster in a suit and wearing a little flag pin or a religious collar to tell them how to vote. After watching and listening to two years of endless campaigning, you have no excuse. Everything’s out there on the table, in plain sight. You’re screwing with the future of the world and you’ve got all the evidence. The only thing left is black or white. If you’re going to vote your bigotry, and you succeed, then the heavens will come down on you and yours – quite literally.

This election isn’t about the usual petty concerns. It’s about the failure of the American, and world, economy. It’s about the climate change that will indeed bring the heavens down on our heads. It’s about the destruction of nations in the blind pursuit of revenge by Republicans, who then make sure they and their friends profit from the death and destruction they wreak abroad and at home. It’s about honor and integrity, it’s about telling the truth, it’s about the dignity of being honest and facing real problems.

McCain offers lies, deceit, incompetence, race-baiting, and racial hatred, and offers more of the policies of George Bush and the Republicans that have brought the world to the abyss. He’s been erratic in his actions and proposals, and has demonstrated ignorance of the key issues of war, security, and the economy. The people around him are ideologues who have damaged the country profoundly (Phil Gramm comes to mind…) That’s all he’s got. That’s all he’s offered.

Obama has run a dignified, intelligent, and honest campaign. He’s run an effective campaign. He’s been open and accessible. He’s demonstrated a solid understanding of the issues and has brought into his campaign people who are experienced, knowledgeable, and competent. You may think he’s too liberal or too progressive, or not liberal or progressive enough. You may, as The Lion has, disagree virulently with some of his positions. But the quality of his character is evident to anyone not blinded by bigotry, ignorance, or hatred.

This election is not just a turning point for America, for American politics, for American history. It is a key event in the history of civilization. This election may determine whether civilization survives, indeed, whether life on earth survives.

John McCain, his erratic incompetence and his hordes of grasping corporate lobbyists, George Bush and his Neocon ideologues, and Sarah Palin and her legions of hate and ignorance, should have no place in the choices that lie ahead, in the actions the country and the world need to take. McCain, Palin, and their ilk must be soundly repudiated in this election.